Whether R&B, Techno, Jazz or Metal, Don’t Pin Them Down

New Music From SZA, Zeitgeber, Dead in the Dirt and Jonathan Moritz

According to plans, the singer SZA will have three EPs out this year. “Z” is due next month, and songs are available online.Credit
Carlos Gonzalez

SZA

Z

There’s a mess of feelings in the songs of the young semi-R&B singer SZA, real name Solana Rowe: dreamy, wise, prickly, love-struck, diligent, oblique, bummed out. She’s been signed by TDE, Kendrick Lamar’s label. Her music has been coming forth on a series of EPs: one from April called “S,” the next called “Z” to be released in mid-September, and “A” apparently coming before the end of the year. A lot of it is available at soundcloud.com/justsza, which draws a broad sample from the cool present: menacing trap beats, ambient echoes, blurry atmospheres, pleasure-pain dichotomies. Her songs have grace in uncommon structures, and she’s aware that she’s complicated: “don’t come close/you don’t even know me” goes the refrain of “Teen Spirit.” One of the newest tracks, “Julia,” at first sounds like 1984, a moment-zero time when Prince was the best rock star, Madonna and Shannon had urgency and romantic depth, and the golden age of hip-hop recording hadn’t quite got going. The track is up-tempo and sweet. And the beat changes two-thirds of the way through, and “Julia” turns into another song, radically slow and resigned. “Funny how life is turning out,” she murmurs. “Not that much to talk about.”

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The saxophonist Jonathan Moritz, performing with his jazz trio, has a new album, “Secret Tempo,” that plays with time. (One of its tracks is called “Medium.”)Credit
Michelle Arcila

Zeitgeber

ZEITGEBER

The European techno producers Speedy J and Lucy — one known for brighter music, one for darker — have combined to make danceable music under the name Zeitgeber with a near-erasure of beats. It’s there in polyrhythmic traces, in subtle and layered digital stitching along the spine of a track; otherwise, the songs on “Zeitgeber” (Stroboscopic Artefacts), their self-titled collaboration, are quiet, ghostly and deeply textured. They sound almost natural, like the combinations of repetitive sounds you hear in a typical city, but slightly more massaged and organized into a single pulse and a narrative.

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The Atlanta trio Dead in the Dirt has come out with its first full-length album.Credit
Kendra Connally

Jonathan Moritz Trio

SECRET TEMPO

The most enduring jazz styles and strategies have endured for so long that they exist partly to be interrogated, and in “Secret Tempo” (Hot Cup) the saxophonist Jonathan Moritz ventures, clinically and playfully, into the question of the listener’s expectations. It’s an album divided into three concerns: tempo, fundamentals (melody, harmony and rhythm) and meter. The music often sounds as if it’s off the cuff when it’s actually planned, and the plans are mostly counterintuitive. So in the medium-tempo piece, for example — it’s called “Medium” — the song stretches out its chord changes so far that you can’t quite tell what the structure is. In the meter piece there’s a steady ostinato groove, but the musicians veer progressively away until they’re only feeling it as a kind of background memory.

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Speedy J, left, and Lucy, both European techno producers, have come together in a duo named Zeitgeber, which has a new self-titled album of dance music.Credit
Riccardo Malberti

Dead in the Dirt

THE BLIND HOLE

What is the point, or the function, with all these new examples of hardcore, grindcore, D-beat, power-violence, black metal? What is it doing now that it didn’t do 30 years ago? Dead in the Dirt, an Atlanta trio colliding all those subgenres with a straightedge and vegan agenda — though you wouldn’t know that without supplied information — helps answer that question. “The Blind Hole” (Southern Lord), its first full-length album, contains a bit more of everything than bands did back then: more precision of attack, more speed; more low-end in the open-string chords of the drop-D tuning; more power in the downstrokes, the feedback and the vocals; more resonance; and, importantly, more swing in the grooves. The songs switch up somewhat: There’s a slow and contemplative part at the beginning of “Caged,” a sludgy breakdown in “You Bury Me,” and a couple of ominous spoken-word passages that sound like found audio letters. But mostly the album lets you understand this band, for 22 short songs in a row, as one bright beam of detailed aggression, a physical force.

A version of this review appears in print on August 25, 2013, on Page AR16 of the New York edition with the headline: Whether R&B, Techno, Jazz or Metal, Don’t Pin Them Down. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe